I could probably put Haddaway lyrics here

[speedofnaked]

WHO: Terra Branford and Keith Anyan
WHERE: The City! Somewhere.
WHEN: Today
WARNINGS: Schizophrenic genre switches and mood swings, magic gone awry, hideous hideous hideous.
WHAT: Everything is broken forever. By which I mean human souls are reclaimed, a chance encounter turns this into a bad soap opera, more hideous.
WORDS: yes

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[prodigitalson]

On the flip side, Keith was not so happy about machines suddenly attacking people. For as long as he could remember, machines had been the one thing he could trust. But the 'Porter had already ruined that, so why expect the rest of this world's technology to behave itself, either? Besides...

...he had other things to worry about.

No amount of fending off rabid toasters could entirely distract him from the fact that he felt different. A little mellow, a little light-headed--he was still half-convinced someone had drugged him, but it had lasted over two days now, so that couldn't be it. And besides...it didn't feel like he'd been drugged, not really. It felt like a weight of pressing hatred had been lifted just a little off his shoulders. It felt like he liked the world around him and its people enough to breathe deeply for once

[speedofnaked]

Parks did not usually serve as hiding places for sentient robots, so at first Terra wasn't sure why she came here in the first place. There would be no fighting here, but destruction wasn't really what she wanted either.

What did she want? To protect people, yes. To keep people from fighting, of course. To prevent needless hurt, there was no doubt about that. But those things were not easy to acquire when the forces between which she was permanently caught, a liaison by circumstance of her birth, were not at odds here. The one half didn't even have presence here, aside from within her.

And it was that half that separated her from what she wanted most. To know "love"... that was why Aphrodite had given her the ring her thumb played with. She halfway torn between giving up and ripping the trinket off, to toss it into the trees - or between simply closing her eyes and twisting the gem, bringing the enchantment to life with whomever she stumbled upon

[prodigitalson]

It wasn't a very large park; it would be easy for robots to overrun it if they wanted to. That had been Keith's excuse for settling in here at first, anyway. Now he was just watching the people, a peculiar experience for him.

And then one of them approached him: that girl with the green hair. He thought, reflexively, of shutting her out--glaring at her and giving a terse response. That was what he would normally do. Why not do the same thing now?

Because he no longer felt like he needed to be so alone. It was a subtle change, but it was there.

So instead of a glare, he turned solemn and unjudging eyes on Terra. He recognized her voice. "We've spoken on the network," he said. "My name is Keith Anyan. You're...Terra." It felt strange still to call a person by that name and not the planet they were on.

[speedofnaked]

It was his voice she recognized, even more than his name. He was the man from the planet called Terra, and it had been the coincidence of her name that had sparked any sort of conversation between them. But it was the things he spoke about beyond that which had kept her attention, of the nature of humans, of power, and war. It reminded of her own world, and how little she really knew about it.

"Yes, I am." She could have just continued on, with that minor curiosity satisfied, but... perhaps what she wanted was a conversation, and not a battle. It wasn't as though there were many people she felt she could talk to, anyway-Jomy was still abroad, Zelgadis would give her deadpan looks and probably change the subject, and trying to talk to her teammates made Terra feel like even more of a lost child. While probably not the best choice for conversation, there still existed between them some common ground.

Regardless, she still hesitated before finally gesturing to Keith's bench. "Do you mind if I...?"